Accused predator free amid court delay, lawyer vacation

As a local “slumlord” amasses victims and charges, including sexual assault and rental assistance fraud, the accused predator and a few of his victims detailed their accounts to The Examiner. Billy Lynn Woolley, 49, avoided bond revocations – and jail time – the week of Oct. 5, while remaining free on cash bonds totaling in excess of $200,000 until at least November despite earning new charges while out on parole.

Woolley currently has five unresolved felonies and one misdemeanor against him for charges including indecency with a child, sexual assault, aggravated assault, assault/family violence (one misdemeanor, one felony) and securing the execution of a document by deception. According to information from Criminal District Judge John Stevens’ court, the judge postponed Woolley’s bond hearing until Nov. 8 or 9 after initially asking for it to take place “next week” on Sept. 28. The Examiner learned the delay is due to Woolley’s lawyer, James Makin, having a vacation scheduled during October.

“100% I’m innocent, and 100% y’all are reporting correct stuff that is public record,” Woolley told the publication after reading a story concerning his latest crime. “The part that’s hurting me the most is that y’all keep putting the child stuff in there.”

“Obviously, if a guy is good-looking enough to have this many (nine) ex-wives, I’m not what they say I am,” he said in reference to the indicted cases of indecency with a child, sexual assault, aggravated assault and assault/family violence. “If y’all really want to write a case, how about y’all find out who Billy Woolley actually is?”

So, in an effort to offer a more precise description of “who Billy Woolley actually is,” The Examiner reached out to a number of his nine ex-wives and fiancées.

Texas exes

“He is a raging narcissist – everything that he does has a motive,” said Michelle Harder, Woolley’s third wife, in comments that echoed the thoughts of many of her cohorts. “He portrays himself as an altruist who cares about those who are in need, and he’ll set himself up in a position to help people. But, it’s always to benefit him.

“He often wears a fake sheriff’s badge, or he’ll wear a baseball cap with a sheriff’s symbol on it. He doesn’t actually say he’s an officer, but because he always has a sidearm and always has that appearance; he’s implying it. He’s very sneaky. He knows how to do certain things without actually crossing that line. That has been his thing since I’ve known him: skirting the line without crossing it. But he crosses it a lot more often than he will admit.

“He’ll lie even when the truth will benefit him more. He’s a habitual liar.”

Harder was in a common-law marriage with Woolley between 2002 and 2009. She’s the mother of Woolley’s victim in his indicted case of indecency with a child, when he allegedly masturbated in front of his nine-year-old stepchild. The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office failed to provide a copy of the aforementioned crime’s corresponding probable cause affidavit – despite multiple requests.

“He used to play – and this is really disgusting – this game with her where they would pass gas in each other’s faces and see who would stink the most, and he told her, ‘If you’ll slide your panties to the side, yours will stink worse.’ So, he would have her slide her panties to the side – this little five or six-year-old girl,” Harder alleged.

In another instance when Woolley reportedly crossed another line, the man set out to punish the child for perceived rudeness by locking her in a dark room and pretending to be the devil. As Harder recalled, “He locked her in her bedroom and turned all the lights off. Then he put a black mask on. He said he was the devil and she was in hell – that she was going to burn for eternity if she ever said anything rude to Mr. Woolley again. Then he turned on the lights and came back in to comfort her and say, ‘That was just a bad dream.’”

Harder thought the story was merely a vivid dream when she initially heard it, but her daughter insisted otherwise. That led Harder to press Woolley, who admitted to using the psychological scare tactics. She needed discipline, according to Woolley. Women who spoke to The Examiner referred to Woolley as an emotional and psychological manipulator.

When Harder finally left Woolley, he crossed yet another line by telling his soon-to-be ex-stepdaughter a secret her mother wasn’t prepared to tell the 11-year-old child: that she was born from an nonconsensual sexual encounter, as the woman told The Examiner.

“He said that when we left,” she recalled. “He said, “Your mom never wanted you. You’re just a burden to her. She has no money – I have all the money. You are better off with me.’”

According to the mother of Woolley’s son, a woman whose identity The Examiner is withholding to protect her children, “He’s narcissistic; he’s controlling. He literally thinks he does no wrong. He belittles people. If you are not up to his standards he will make you feel like you were below. He gets off on making people feel bad and he wants to put everybody beneath him because he thinks he is above everybody, including the law. He’s just a terrible (expletive) person.”

Billy Woolley is the true embodiment of pure evil, according to Anna Wann, a woman Woolley was engaged to when he was 43 and she was 17. She’s also the victim in a couple of Woolley’s indictments.

“He gets off on hurting people,” she said. “He’s a thief, a con artist. He can’t help but steal whatever he can from whomever he can – whether he’s scamming the government, shoplifting from stores, committing credit card fraud. But those are just the physical things. I think he gets more pleasure stealing peoples’ happiness, their sense of security, their self-esteem. And that’s what he is best at.”

Wann says those unlucky enough to have any form of relationship with this “monster” will more than likely walk away as a shell of the person they were before meeting him.

“Whether he uses physical harm to beat you down, or uses his words as he emotionally and psychologically destroys you,” she said, “he will take pride in watching you struggle to mend what he broke in you if you leave. I can’t begin to tell you all the times I almost died at his hands – being strangled, or smothered with pillows until I began to lose consciousness, the feeling of the barrel of a gun against my head. That’s just a few examples. The scariest part of it all was the satisfaction on his face that came from seeing me scared for my life. I have never met a more downright evil person in my life.”

A wolf in sheep’s wool

“He’s smooth and he’s charming when he wants to be – but when he turns it off, he’s a totally different person,” said the mother of Woolley’s son.

In one instance of Woolley’s alleged self-centered behavior, Harder described a vacation that nearly ended in murder when Woolley put a gun to his wife’s head. The duo were out to eat in Jasper with another married couple. Harder said the other woman became overtly intoxicated, so she helped her back to their room, where she slept on the floor as the other woman recovered in bed. According to Harder, Woolley suspected his wife was actually cheating on him.

“I woke up not a couple hours later with him dragging me out by my hair to the truck,” leaving behind her phone and the crutches she was using post-surgery, she described. “He drove me for about 30 minutes around and around until I was disoriented. He pulled into a marsh and pulled out his pistol and put it to my head and said, ‘What did you guys do in there?’ He thought that she and I were in there getting it on and didn’t invite him. So, for two hours, he paced back and forth in front of the door. He tried to look under the crack in the door. He imagined that we were doing all these things and didn’t invite him.

“I was able to talk him down, but he said, ‘I am going to put a bullet in your head, and I’m going to leave you here.’”

“Half of his threats are just bluster,” she added. “But, at the time, being so indoctrinated and so brainwashed, you believe him – you’re terrified, and you believe him.”

“He literally said, ‘There are two ways that you will leave this house: one is with me, and the other is in a bodybag. And if you leave, I will take your daughter somehow.’ And he tried.”

The mother of Woolley’s son, Christopher Woolley, confirmed he was born after Billy and his friends raped her in high school.

“I was gang raped by Billy and two of his friends, and that’s how I got pregnant when I was 16,” said the woman, who went to school at Hamshire-Fannett with Woolley in the 80s. She says she was kicked out of school for the pregnancy Woolley caused.

“He would hold that over my head. He would say, ‘I’m gonna tell your husband what happened,’” she said. “Well, my husband already knew everything that happened.

“That instance, what happened when I got pregnant, was not the first time he was mentally and physically abusive. He held a gun to my head – that was in high school. He was a football player in Fannett, and if you were a football player in Fannett you could do whatever you wanted. You couldn’t get in trouble.”

That wasn’t the only time Woolley allegedly held a gun to a woman’s head, with Harder detailing a similar story of Woolley’s alleged manipulation. The man actually admitted to the paper he held a gun up to a third woman’s head.

“Only a couple of men I know I’m afraid of; he’s one of them,” said one sourse close to Woolley.

“He’s a terrible human,” she further said, detailing stories of an abusive and berating verbal assault upon declining an invitation to “hang out,” and an incident of Woolley finding foley in the grief of a mourning mother participating in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Woolley, many AA attendees claim, never had an addiction of his own, however, but frequented the sober solices of those in recovery.

Narcissism and sexual aggression

According to a 2002 study replicated by a multitude of scholars and conducted by psychologists at Case Western Reserve University, a private research school in Ohio, narcissistic, empathy-lacking men – which is exactly how women describe Woolley – are likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviors, including sexual assault and rape.

“Men’s efforts to force women to engage in unwanted sexual activity can be explained by a combination of reactance theory and narcissism,” the study reads. “Reactance theory suggests that deprivation of specific sexual options will cause men to desire them more, to try to reclaim them by forcing sex and by aggressing against the woman who has refused them, and assorted findings support this analysis. Narcissism is proposed to moderate the link, especially because coercion is relatively rare in response to sexual refusals. Evidence about sexually coercive men supports the narcissism hypothesis, such as by showing self-serving cognitive distortions, an excessive concern with being admired, an inflated sense of entitlement, selectively low empathy, and a broadly exploitative approach to heterosexual relations.”

Sins of the father

Being raised by a man who emits an aura of unfettered self-servitude, as former fiancées and wives describe, has led his son Christopher Woolley down a criminally similar path. According to a sex offender registry review, a judge convicted Billy’s son Christopher of child pornography possession with intent to distribute in 2020. Former stepmoms and his biological mother agree that Christopher’s proclivity for children is directly attributable to his father.

“His father basically groomed him to be a predator,” Harder said about her ex-stepson. “He’s attracted to young girls because he, emotionally, he’s still a child. That doesn’t make, but I understand it because I understand Chris as a person.”

Harder recalled an incident that occurred after she left Woolley, an incident that haunted her daughter ever since.

“She was about 12, and she still hung out with Chris, as long as Billy wasn’t around,” Harder remembered. “She said that she and her best friend were over hanging out with Chris – because he was her brother. Apparently, he got her and her little friend drunk, and she woke up with him on top of her. So, I was going to pursue that, but he was already in prison for child pornography possession.”

“I do believe the way my son was brought up – and his thinking – has 100% to do with his dad,” said Christopher’s mother. “I mean, yeah, he was a grown-up and he chose to do the stuff he did. But, he paid his price. He was in jail for almost three-and-a-half years. He showed that he accepted what he did – something his father will never do.”

In fact, Billy did deny culpability when confronted by The Examiner, saying, “He was a 26-year-old man who wasn’t living with me. No, I have nothing to do with that.”

However, Billy has shown his own attraction to those far younger than him, admitting to being engaged to a 17-year-old when he was 43. Woolley reportedly met this fiancée while she was babysitting for him.

“She’s not your standard 17-year-old. Anna Wann at 15, 16 was in rehab,” he said before offering a vulgar description of the teen’s experiences. “It’s not like I’m rolling by a junior high, picking up junior high school-aged girls. This girl was a recovering addict that I was helping, and we entered into a relationship because she got kicked out of rehab.”

When asked whether he saw anything wrong with being engaged to a 17-year-old girl when he was 43, Woolley rationalized, “I’m from Vietnam, and, culturally, if you go to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos – all these expat countries, you will clearly see that age is not ever a difference in foreign countries.

“So, culturally, honestly, no, I honestly didn’t see it,” said the 49-year-old former Hamshire-Fannett football player. It should also be noted that he has lived in Southeast Texas for decades.

“Now, to be honest with you, looking back on it, absolutely. It’s kinda sick.”

Waiting on justice

Woolley’s victims now have to wait until Nov. 8, at the earliest, for even a glimpse at justice.

Judge Stevens told Woolley the court was considering revoking his bond after the man allegedly attempted to defraud the South East Texas Regional Planning Commission (SETRPC) of $115,000 in rent relief during the pandemic.

“The court is considering revoking all his bonds and giving him no bond,” Stevens said, before deferring the matter to a future date. “The indictment is probable cause that he committed a crime while on the court’s bond. That may be sufficient enough.”

“Billy’s got this big, expensive lawyer; there is no other lawyer in the office who can take care of the case,” one outcry complainant remarked to The Examiner,  perturbed and dismayed by the delay. “Because his lawyer is on vacation, (Billy) can’t show up for his bond hearing. Are you kidding me? Him being indicted for something else should completely revoke his parole.

“With everything getting put off and put off and put off, we’re feeling like our cases don’t matter – it’s like what he did to us doesn’t mean anything. I’m scared he’s just gonna get away with everything.”

B. Scott McLendon is a staff writer in his fourth year in Beaumont. Contact Scott with questions, comments and story ideas by calling (334) 482-2801, emailing scott@theexaminer.com or visiting The Examiner at 795 Willow Street in Downtown Beaumont.